@lnlyisol

I'm so disgusted with the state of search these days. It's not just the AI it's the AI slop combined with the mushy "let us tell you what you really meant" search results.

Obscure band names, artists, concepts are "corrected" to more popular words. "ant" is swapped for "art" if I'm looking for anything cute or amusing ("cute art stickers" NO I want "cute ANT stickers")

It's like modern search is trying to make everyone hopelessly basic. Only popular things exist.

@lnlyisol

Am I just getting old? One of the things that made me fall in love with the internet is how if you looked for something, no matter how obscure, no matter how unlikely if someone had gone to the trouble of making it you could find it.

That just isn't true in the same way anymore. It's more likely you will be redirected to a more "normal search query"

It "works better" for many people most of the time. But, that's at the expense of making everything strange hidden.

@lnlyisol

I get that even with dictionary lookups on the mac. Highlight a slightly obscure word that “sounds like” something else and apple just says screw it, we'll use the more common word. There's not even a courtesy “we didn't find XYZ, did you mean ABC?” with a link to "no, I meant XYZ , figure it out”.

@lnlyisol

FWIW, "ant stickers" worked for me on DDG:

duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=ant+s…

.@futurebird @lnlyisol Have you tried this?

udm14.com/

@lnlyisol Kagi has you covered.

@kagihq

@lnlyisol

Yes ... this.

I have just looked for Arthur Arrowsmith, a local Wolverhampton artist only to be offered Aerosmith 🙁(

@lnlyisol OK. We've tried this "Search engine" stuff. Can we go back now to yellow pages?

Or newsgroups?

@lnlyisol This is a known issue for Google, and as far as Google is concerned, it's working as intended. Typos are common so it biases in favor of most popular search results. If you search logged in, it does tend to learn your preferences eventually, but whether you're willing to search logged in with Google is an individual choice.

I don't know that other search engines are vulnerable to these effects or not. Google is definitely playing in a class of its own of too clever for its own good.

@lnlyisol
Normal people should never have been given access to computers.

When the audience was technical people, they understood there was a sausage being made and could collaborate for the best sausage.

Now that the market is "everybody", there's a lot of selling "magic". "We'll fix your mistakes" and "here's a bunch of LLM garbage" both dazzle low-skill users, and steer towards profitable choices. It just comes at the expense of competent users whose queries get clobbered.

@lnlyisol

I find it interesting.

Years ago, before it was called Googling, I would search for something, not find it, and ask for help.

People would scream - Just search and find it yourself!

Which didn’t work, as I had obviously already done so.

However, they had already trained their search engines to display that information. I hadn’t, as I hadn’t found it.

Now, I find search easier, and they find search impossible.

Maybe I just used to niche of terms back then. Maybe the niche terms became mainstream.

And I often have autocomplete and autocorrect off.

I wish you luck!

@lnlyisol @spacelizard I can appreciate not everyone can afford to pay for search, but @kagihq is really good, I wouldn’t go back to google

youtu.be/ijUfCMd2IL8

What Is Kagi Search?

Kagi is a premium, ad-free search engine created to provide high-quality, unbiased search results without the distractions of advertisements or data tracking...

^YouTube

AI is a predictability machine. It is inherently conservative and populist.

@futurebird @lnlyisol

@lnlyisol agreed with this 100%.

Another effect, due to search trying to find you the most commonly accepted information, and publishers trying to meet that demand, the internet these days is a vast, shallow sea of entry level introductory information, repeated thousands of times over, with mid level and higher understandings frustratingly out of reach.

Like everything is the first month and a half of an introductory course. Sometimes YouTube can get you another month and a half.

@lnlyisol

What I find hard to imagine is that there must have been people who were annoyed, frustrated that they typed "cute ant stickers" and obviously "ant" was a typo! who would want "ant stickers" gross, right?

The computer ought to "know" that no one would want to see that and show them what they meant.

The needs of that person are more important than whatever I'm trying to do.

But I also wonder if that person really exists. Are people happy this happens?

@lnlyisol In the early days, there was a lot to do about "the long tail". How the internet made it worthwhile to cater to niche subjects because you could cast such a wide net.

I felt this died when companies like Netflix became big. They started focusing on things with mass appeal. They could have broadened their catalog with lots of cheap, niche movies that a few people would like but they never bothered.

I think it would still make them money. It just doesn't generate prestige.

@lnlyisol

I agree--I resent this and find it endlessly depressing :-\

@lnlyisol well, except for the zone of stuff that was made before the web existed and was not yet historic or notable enough to rate a mention in someone's neighborhood memories blog/ get cataloged on discogs/ whatever

That zone shrank but never completely disappeared

@lnlyisol
I feel the same way, finding weird stuff was something I used to do in the library back in the day, and I loved having it at my fingertips. Even mainstream items are getting hard to find now on the Internet, and my library skills have atrophied.

/Sad face

We started out in school by analysing the murder of Friedrich Schumm on April 1st 1933. He was a jewish lawyer born in #Kiel and where his parents still lived. On the day of a visit at home due to the marriage of his little sister, the SS was enforcing a boycott of the shop his father was operating.

He wanted to the enter the shop of his father but was hindered by the SS picket. A short fight ensued, a shot rang out and a man from the SS was seriously injured. Schumm fled, presented himself at a police station and was arrested.

Later that day, a lynch mob compromised of members of the SA/SS formed. The ransacked the shop of his father and with the help of Nazi politicians they entered the prison and his cell. They shot him 30 times.

2/5

There was a game named Detention (and later film adoption) with background in the white terror period in Taiwan (when Kuomintang declared marcial law and limited freedom of speech of citizens with the army). There was this one line I have never been able to forgot:
"Did you forgot, or are you too terrified to remember?"

I guess humans are very good at lying to themselves.

V interesting thread! Thanks!

….. and, as an additional reminder of the German post-war failure to seriously acknowledge its Nazi past & to vigorously de-Nazify - a failure which echoes today in its repressive domestic & foreign policies:

“The Role Ex-Nazis Played in Early West Germany”

by Ralf Beste, Georg Bönisch, Thomas Darnstaedt, Jan Friedmann, Michael Fröhlingsdorf and Klaus Wiegrefe in Spiegel International (2012)

spiegel.de/international/germa…

#Germany #Government #Nazi #Genocide

From Dictatorship to Democracy: The Role Ex-Nazis Played in Early West Germany

After World War II, West Germany rapidly made the transition from murderous dictatorship to model democracy. Or did it? New documents reveal just how many officials from the Nazi regime found new jobs in Bonn.

^{Ralf Beste (DER SPIEGEL)}

there is a well known Dutch saying, in German, which translates as “we didn’t know”.

en.wiktionary.org/wiki/wir_hab…

Funny thing: it is not a well known German saying afaik.

Cynically, it is the exact defence most Dutch people, even in my family, use to deny any responsibility for not stopping the slaughter of homosexuals, Roma, political opponents and eventually of course the Jews.

As an historian and a human I am sure this time around it will be exactly the same.

great thread. I've been thinking of all this since when I saw it all starting (I mean starting even MORE, these problems have always been in the USA, but I figured after Obama it would eventually swing HARD the other way and we'd have issues due to all the ignorant, racist fucks in this country, and here we are).

I told my parents Bannon was a white supremacist before the first Trump election. They didn't believe me. We haven't talked for 10+ years. Good riddance if they still believe their crap. Christofascism led us here.

And now people ARE protesting in the streets, and we're all figuring out what to do. The USA has always had issues like this and now it's all come to a head. Uncharted territory. People feel helpless as this bs system has finally failed everyone.

As Bob Dylan said and I agree, I'm not sure any country founded on slave labor can ever be great.

youtube.com/playlist?list=PLsI…

"Rise of Hitler" - Mapped through the various newspapers from Jan. 1930 until the war starts

The "which newspaper did you read?" comment reminded me of this great series

Rise of Hitler

Share your videos with friends, family, and the world

^YouTube

Thank you for sharing this! I wish we would have had a teacher like this. I don't think this lie was actually questioned at my school. If a teacher says this in school and some people say this in a documentary, it must be somewhat true, at least that was my belief at the time. And it's not like this was talked about in my family a lot. WW2 in general? Of course. But personal involvement? My grandfather had a war injury, that wasn't really a thing one could hide, but by the time I was at an age where we talked about this stuff at school, many of my grandparents were dead or we weren't seeing them often anymore due to a divorce.

Of course by now I know it was a lie and more and more historians mention it, articles are being published etc. but there aren't really many people you can ask anymore nowadays, unlike when I was young. It's really a pity our teacher missed that chance of educating us properly. But yeah, back then everyone's grandparents didn't know or were in the resistance or both. 😁

Not surprised this is getting a rerun though, "we didn't know" already resurfaced in a milder version after the Berlin Wall fell and nobody has ever known about the Stasi or only suspected things. (That said, the Stasi at least tried to hide it to some extent, so there is that.)

"I didn't want to know."

Human history is littered with variations on that, also:
"I was only obeying orders"
"If I didn't do it I/a relative would have been killed"
"Better them than me"
amongst other mendacious excuses for cowardice.

The truly courageous, who were so radical they merely distributed leaflets, perished on the Fallbeilen*, used so often they had to redesign the things for rapid killing, even having back of a truck versions.

Those who did act usually ended up hanged with piano wire, often in the same death rooms as the fallbeil.

In either case, they spent some time with the Geheime Staatspolizei.

The "useful" Nazis escaped the rope / blade / bullet and got new identities in the west, usually the USA.

*not sure of the plural form